Little Boy Blues (2 page)

When I was five, my uncle took me to a marionette show. At first I did not want to go, because it meant missing a morning of kindergarten, but also because the show was in the elementary school across the street, and as an only child who spent most of my time alone, I was vaguely frightened at the thought of sitting with a lot of big kids I didn’t know. But Uncle Tom explained that we would go together, and that was fine. I was used to going places with my uncle, a Presbyterian minister. Several times a week—and sometimes almost every day, now that he was picking me up at noon from the kindergarten at the First Presbyterian Church downtown—I accompanied him on his errands to the hospital, the newspaper, and sometimes to people’s houses for what I learned were called pastoral visits. I liked it when things had special names that not everyone knew.

The big brick elementary school—built between the two world wars, when the architecture of schools was still as stolidly handsome as that of banks or post offices—sat across Patterson Avenue from my uncle’s church and the manse where my aunt
and uncle lived.
(Manse
was another one of those secret words I liked, but it was troublesome, too, because no one else I knew had any idea what I was talking about except the grown-ups in my family, and with them I just felt foolish if I asked, “Are we going back to the manse now?”) Every afternoon I would stand in the yard and watch the big kids as they came out of school to walk home. I never beheld the broad, brick two-story building without feeling both eagerness and trepidation in equal measure. Then and for a long time thereafter, hope and fear were the two guiding polestars in my life. On the one hand, I was an incorrigible optimist. I had no reasons for this, never figured out where this notion that things were bound to get better came from, but nothing could extinguish it. At the same time, I spent a good part of every day being terrified of something—anything from mayonnaise in sandwiches to batting against the older kids in backyard baseball games. I was like the boy who confronts a roomful of manure and becomes convinced that somewhere in that room is a pony. It was just that I was equally convinced the pony would eat me.

Now that I had actually set foot inside the school for the first time, there was not even a second to savor the experience because we were caught in what seemed to me a fierce and endless current of children all bigger than I was, all pulling, tugging and jostling and none in the same direction. Without even having to think about it, I clung to my uncle’s hand and hugged his side. But instead of moving forward, Uncle Tom stopped and began talking to another man whom he introduced as the principal, a tall, thin man with thick black hair covering the backs of his hands. My mother had a principal at the school where she taught, too. Lately she had been insisting that it was the polite
thing to do to engage people I met for the first time in conversation, and I was going to ask this principal if he was “picky” like the one at Mother’s school, but before I could say anything, we were shown to two seats in the auditorium that had been saved for us.

Tall windows ran the length of the long walls on either side of the auditorium, but the drapes had been drawn over the windows, turning it gloomy inside the room that was, I noticed, even taller than the sanctuary in my uncle’s church. Unlike the church sanctuary, which had a hush about it even when it was filled with the congregation on Sunday morning, the school auditorium was noisy with the sound of the other children laughing and talking as they were herded by their teachers, one row at a time, into their seats. I decided that this was not like church but more like the movie theaters downtown where I had been taken to see
Bambi
and
Snow White
and
The Ten Commandments
. Only this was a lot noisier. I wondered if this was like the
Kiddie Show
. (The
Kiddie Show
was held every Saturday at the Carolina Theater downtown, and it lasted all morning. Disc jockeys from radio stations that no one in my family ever listened to or even acknowledged existed played host to games and old movie serials and cartoons, and served all the drinks and popcorn you could swallow before the main feature, which, my friend Sam told me, was usually a Hercules movie. Sam’s mother offered to take me once, but when Mother found out that there would be no adult chaperones in the theater during the show, she refused to let me go along.) Then the lights went out in the auditorium, except for the lights that played against the curtain across the stage. The principal came out and started talking. I was not listening. My attention was drawn to a smaller rectangle within the larger rectangle
formed by the stage proscenium. The curtains on the stage came up to each side of this smaller box, which I recognized as a smaller stage with its own curtains. I had never seen anything like this, and I leaned over to ask my uncle what it was all about, but he just squeezed my hand tight and pursed his lips. He was smiling, so I knew it was all right. Then the principal was gone and the room went dark.

It was nothing like a movie, because once the curtain parted, there was no audience and no stage. It was as though I were part of the story, or rather, it was as though I were telling the story, too. It was like one of those recurring dreams in which everything is at once strange and familiar (magic beans, beanstalk, threatening giant and then Jack triumphant) and, stranger yet, where some part of your brain acknowledges that you are dreaming even while it’s happening. The herky-jerky marionettes on the stage were not human, but they were real all the same, wooden but not inanimate, miniature but, because everything around them was the same scale, not miniature, and all of it more vivid than life itself. When it was over, I felt myself exhale, as though I had ceased to breathe throughout the entire performance. When the dark room erupted with applause, I did not clap, but merely sat there, stunned, staring at the purple curtain that had just swished shut on the tiny stage within a stage. My uncle was saying something that I could not hear for all the clapping, or maybe because I did not trust my ears. I leaned closer to him, still not speaking myself because somehow the story was still alive, still unspooling behind my eyes, and I knew somehow that as long as I kept quiet, maintained the exact position and attitude I had
adopted during the performance, I could keep it going forever, even as it died, like a dream that evaporates when you break the surface of sleep. My uncle was speaking again, and this time I heard him and still did not believe what I was hearing: “Do you want to go backstage?”

Later, when I tried to recall that Christmas morning, the Christmas that came two months after the performance at the school, the only thing I could remember was the box that held the marionette. Maybe that was because it was the longest moment of that day, the moment when I had the wrapping paper off and sat there, staring through the clear plastic on the front of the box at the little figure inside. For a split second, I thought that perhaps Santa Claus had messed up and brought me a doll. But surely Santa would not have erred so badly as to bring me a black doll! Then I saw the strings and knew what I was holding. Or maybe I remembered that moment when I first beheld the marionette in its box because that was the last pure moment of the morning, before things got complicated. I had a marionette of my own. In that moment, everything was perfect.

“Santa Claus had to make two stops this time,” my uncle said. We were all gathered in my aunt and uncle’s living room—my mother and father, Tom and Melita. Christmas—and by Christmas I and everyone I knew meant that time when you got to open presents—was already over. I had had Christmas two hours earlier, with Mother and Daddy at the apartment on Gilmer Avenue. I wasn’t sure why—I knew it had something to do with the fact that my father had come home to live a few weeks before—my mother had finally listened to Daddy’s complaint (“Why do they
have to rush up here at the crack of dawn every Christmas? Why can’t they hold off or let us come down there?”) and told Tom and Melita that we would have Christmas alone this year and then come down to the manse so I could show off my new toys.

“Sometimes extra-good little boys get two visits,” my aunt said gaily. “And Santa heard you might be interested in a puppet.” I hardly heard her. I was staring intently through the glassine cover on the little coffinlike box at a minstrel boy with a conical hat, the black face grinning up at me through the cover.

“Mr. Bones. I mean, Mr. Jones, meet Tambo,” my uncle said, laughing at some joke I didn’t understand.

“I believe it says ‘Bimbo’ on the box,” Aunt Melita said.

“Melita,
please,”
my uncle said. That was all: “Melita, please,” but that was how they fought, or as far as they got with fighting. It was my uncle’s way of forbidding contradiction. When they disagreed, she softly voiced her opposition with questions, and I learned to read my uncle’s mood by how long he allowed the questions to go on before his exasperation got the better of him. Even at five, and without trying or even knowing I had the knack, I had become a connoisseur of how grown-ups quarreled.

My parents’ fights were different. Mother liked to corner Daddy, in the kitchen, or in the bathroom, where she needled him until—if he was sober—he moved past her with an athlete’s second-nature ability to create space where no space had existed and then kept going, right out of the tiny apartment. My mother would look at me then and say, “What are we going to do?” If my father started drinking at home (Daddy was the only member of the family who drank or smoked, and he usually did his drinking elsewhere—I wasn’t sure where that was, but I was pretty sure it was a joyless thing: I never saw him drink for pleasure or in a
social situation), Mother pleaded and wheedled every time he opened a can of beer. Then, if it was warm out, he might take his beer and sit on the back steps. When he did that, she would stand at the screen door and the pleading would give way to remonstrating as she taunted him with all the things he hadn’t done that day. These were the times I felt most like a prop, or a piece of ordnance that my mother would use against my father. He was supposed to take his son swimming. He’d promised to take his son to buy shoes. He needed to spend time with his son, throw a baseball, teach him how to be a man. Even then, I knew the manhood in question wasn’t mine. At times like those, I got that too familiar vomitous pennies-in-the-mouth taste and either went to my room or just ducked out the front door and disappeared down the block until the fighting stopped. Based on things I had overheard my mother say—quietly, fiercely, if she was standing at the kitchen door, so no one would overhear (“Won’t say where he goes. Won’t show me his paycheck. Everything’s a big secret with Mr. Mack”)—I came to think of my father as a man of mystery, a riddle that walked or, as likely, slept the day through, in bed, on the couch, someone who could be here in the morning, sitting on the couch doing the crossword puzzle, and then, without warning, be gone that afternoon, for days that sometimes stretched into weeks and months. On those afternoons when I came home to an empty apartment, I would be overcome with a sense of sadness and futility—somehow I would know the apartment was empty as soon as I opened the door—but also a sense of relief, a palpable uncoiling of tension in my chest. I missed my father then, but I also enjoyed his absences. At least then things ran more smoothly. Mother didn’t talk any less, but when Daddy wasn’t around, she grumbled mostly to herself, fretting about
unpaid bills or where she was going to find enough money to get through the summer when she wasn’t drawing a salary for teaching, worrying, or so it seemed, about everything. She always took pains to tell me this had nothing to do with me, that I couldn’t help her, but this only made me feel worse.

I grew up feeling powerless—powerless to help my mother or cure my father’s alcoholism, powerless to stop their fighting or shore up their marriage. And as I grew I spent more and more time in my own head, developing habits (reading and drawing mostly, although there were brief, abortive flings with model airplanes and a chemistry set) to help myself wall out the world. But the feeling of helplessness, a lack of control over any aspect of my life, never went away, even in the best of times. I never spoke about any of this to another living soul, perhaps because, growing up alone and in a peculiar situation, I had no outside point of reference. In the households I knew best, people either talked too much or not at all. Melita and Tom took great pains to avoid any unpleasantness in my presence—they even talked my mother out of letting me attend my grandmother’s funeral when I was nine, because they thought I should be spared. Spared
what
, they never said.

Carefully, as I had been taught, I opened the top of the box and pulled the marionette out. It was tied to a piece of cardboard, and the strings and the wooden controls to which they were knotted were looped over the back of the cardboard.

“Here,” Daddy said, setting aside his cigarette and pulling out his pocketknife, “let me help you with that. We’ll just cut those strings and have him out—”

“Mack!”

Daddy laughed.

“Don’t cut the strings!” I said anxiously. “That’s what makes him work.”

“Is that right?” my father said. “Can you give us a show?”

The Southern households in which I grew up in the fifties and early sixties were populated by aunts and uncles and grandparents born in the nineteenth century. My father, the youngest member of my immediate family, was born in 1920. I had three aunts who never learned to drive. No one in my immediate family—my parents and the aunt and uncle who partly reared me—owned a television set or even had a car radio. My earliest views on life were formed by people who, even when they weren’t born in the nineteenth century, saw the world much as it was seen during Reconstruction. General Sherman’s name was still a dirty word in our family, and my mother loved to show me the “Sherman quilt,” as she always called it, that had been buried with the rest of the family valuables when Sherman marched north through South Carolina in 1865.